"Well, so could you if...." He checked himself. "I don't mean to say anything against a lady...."
"I've always suspected that, too," I admitted, "but one doesn't like to say it."
"Well, you know what she gets—thirty-five a week. A girl doesn't wear diamond sunbursts on that."
"Mr. Griffin, I wish you'd tell me what sort of man it is that gives diamond sunbursts to Variety girls: I've never seen any of them."
"You have probably, but you don't know it. You meet their wives in society."
"Henry Mills." I don't know what made me say it; the image of him came tripping along the surface of my mind and slid off my tongue without having more than momentarily perched there.
"Is he in business downtown, and has he got a perfectly proper family and too many dinners under his vest?"
"Mr. Mills's home life is ideal; but I didn't mean——"
"Neither did I, but that's the type. They mostly have ideal families, but they couldn't live up to them if they didn't have Cecelia Brunes on the side.... I beg your pardon."
He had looked up and caught me blushing a deep, painful red, but it wasn't on account of what he had intimated. I was blushing because of the discovery in myself of needs which, compared to the ideal of life I had set for myself, were as much of a defection as anything our conversation had suggested for Henry Mills. I was conscious in those days of a slow, steady seepage of all my forces toward desperation.